I would never outsource my content to some third party. I blog on my own domain using open source software (WordPress) that I run on a shared server that I can move if I want to. It is a bit of work to set this up but the benefits you get are enormous.

The above quote is coming from someone who was a major investor in, and active user of, Twitter. You can have both. You can tweet and enjoy using Twitter. You don’t have to boycott it to own your own content.

Over the last few months I’ve found the right balance for myself. I’m not syndicating anywhere* but publishing on my blog. I tweet from time-to-time, I post some photos to Instagram and Facebook from time-to-time, but I do all of that manually. I do so full-well-knowing that any of that content can disappear at any time. And I’d totally fine with it if it did, because everything I want to last is here on cdevroe.com.

* All of my posts do end up on micro.blog but that service is simply ingesting my RSS/JSON feed. I do not have to do anything special for that to work. If Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram did that I’d likely turn that on there too. But I’m tired of trying to keep up with their platform changes to write my own plugins, or even use plugins to do so. So I choose to manually POSSE and keep my sanity.

We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

Twitter’s largest issue* is gaining and retaining active users. The platform hasn’t meaningfully grown in many consecutive quarters. While I think it is totally fine to expand the character limit on tweets I do not believe a single holdout will come to Twitter now because of this change.

As far as my opinion about going from 140 to 280 I’m with Fred Wilson:

I don’t like the constraint when I compose tweets, but I love it when I consume them.

I’m sure the current user base will be split on this but I sit here thinking if I were on the Board of Twitter I’d be asking “is this all there is?”

* This is their largest issue purely because they are a public company with revenue based solely on ads.

Even more impressive in many ways, is what Satya Nadella has done at Microsoft. He slayed the Windows Everywhere albatross that was holding Microsoft back for most of the post Gates era and has made Microsoft relevant again in the world of tech. Windows is enjoying a resurgence, the Office app suite is finally and successfully moving to the cloud, and Microsoft’s cloud offerings are strong and getting stronger.

Five years ago you’d walk into any developer conference and all you’d see were Mac laptops. If you saw a Windows laptop it was either running a distribution of Linux or that developer’s company didn’t have the budget to afford company Macs.

Today, Microsoft is on the lips of nearly every developer I talk to. And the conversations are about building products using Microsoft hardware and software. The languages and frameworks being used to build these products are ones that were traditionally a real pain to use on Windows like Bash, Rails, PHP, Apache, nginx, mySQL etc. etc. And today, its easy.

How is Microsoft doing? For the relatively small segment of the world that builds software products; I’d say they are doing extremely well. And with Surface Studio I’m guessing a huge number of artists are jumping from the Mac to PC. Now, can they recapture students and consumers and mobile? We’ll see. They have an awful lot of work to do there.

Fred Wilson recently published a post that I can wholeheartedly agree with him on. Regarding employees leaving your organization he gives the following advice:

The thing I caution against is the tendency to get upset at departures and departing employees. I’ve seen leaders take the mob boss approach of “your are dead to me now” with departing employees. The better approach, which I think is a hallmark of great companies, is the idea that departing employees who leave on great terms are roving ambassadors for your organization. After all, you never know when you are going to come across someone again in business. And it might be a situation where you need something from them.

I’ve hired, I’ve fired, and I’ve been the one that has gotten the news of the departure of a valued member of the team many, many times throughout my career. I’ve also been the one to do the departing.

Let me recount to you a few of these situations and what I learned from them.

First, I’ll start with my own very early career. For a few years I hopped from job to job in relatively short order trying to find the right fit. One such hop was to a healthcare group of companies where I was tasked with managing their IT infrastructure. I did some pretty fun things there (it was the first time I used fiber optics, wow) and learned a lot in only a few months but I was over my head a bit and I knew it. I saw an ad for a web programming job I jumped at the chance.

This is when I learned how to properly allow someone to quit their job. I walked into my then boss’ office, crying (I was 19 and knew the man personally since I was 9 or so). I really felt like I was letting him down by quitting only a few months after getting hired. He asked me why I was quitting. I don’t remember my exact words but I said that I really thought my career was going to be on the web and not in setting up networks or debugging terminals. I wanted to write code.

His response to me has stuck with me ever since and I believe it is why I’ve always allowed people to depart any organization I’ve been part of in the best possible way. He said: “Colin, you have to make the right decision for your family.” (I was newly married at this point.) He continued… “If you think this is the right decision you have to do it. And if our company could have been a stepping stone for you then that is great.”

As Wilson points out above, if he would have flown off the handle I would have never had a relationship with him again. Instead, whenever he needed me I was there for many years afterwards.

Second, fast forward to when an employee of a company that I was part of came to me first to break the news of their departure. They were trying to do damage control by telling me first. I wasn’t this person’s boss. But they knew their boss would lose it. They were right. I tried my best to act as humanely as my boss did from when I was 19. I wished them well. Then I did my best to settle down the boss prior to the news getting to them. It worked out in the end and that person is still a friend to everyone at that company to this day.

Third, fast forward again to when an employee and friend left the company that I owned. This is much different. Being part of a company and owning a company are two very different things. The loyalty you feel to your own company far outweighs any devotion you may feel to one that you do not (even though I consider myself a very loyal employee). When you own the company, and an early employee leaves, it stabs you directly to the heart. You believe these early people have your back through thick and thin. When you find out they don’t and they jump to whatever is next it hurts terribly. I learned a lot from this experience. Years later and I’m still reeling over this person’s departure.

Even though I was more upset than I had ever been in my life I believe I still handled myself in the same way that my boss when I was 19 did. I gave them no pushback, no hurtful words were shared, and I did my very best not to speak too poorly about them behind their backs to others within the company.

The lesson that I learned from this experience is that many people out there view a job as “just a job”. Others fit into several categories. Some small percentage are willing to ruin their lives in order to have the company make it. Some people look up to these individuals. I do not. I admire their accomplishments and their drive is incredible but I fit somewhere between “just a job” and “willing to die”.

I’m glad Wilson brought this up in his post and I’m very glad he’s mentoring the entrepreneurs he talks to about this topic.

The Apple Watch was a flop. This is the one I took the most heat on. So I feel a bit vindicated on this point.

No sources cited here. I have read many “the Apple Watch is a flop” pieces but none of them have convinced me of that using any data. Anecdotally, I suppose, you could look around you and count how many people you know with an Apple Watch and determine that it isn’t an overwhelming runaway hit. However, based on the shipping expectations for the Watch early on I would say it met or exceeded Apple’s own expectations for the launch. I’m also willing to bet there were a lot of Watches as presents this season.

The Apple Watch could be called a flop if it sold so poorly and customer demand or interest was so low that Apple totally shelved the project. But they haven’t. I’m willing to bet they made a lot of money on the Watch so far (far more than any of their competitors in the same space). And I’m willing to bet that in 2016-2017 Apple will double down on the Watch and make some incredible improvements to every piece of it.

My take; again, comparing it to the original iPhone. When I paid $1,200 in cash for Eliza and I to get an original iPhone many people thought I was crazy. For many months I only knew a handful of people with an iPhone. Everyone saw the iPhone and immediately wanted one but none of them wanted the first version or to pay a premium for that first version. However, here we are 8 years later and the iPhone business itself is still larger than all of Microsoft. So my take is that the launch of the Apple Watch may have only just met the expectations of Apple but didn’t meet the expectations of the press (not surprisingly).

Someone like Fred Wilson, who invests in both short term and longterm businesses and obviously does very well at doing that, should know better than to call a product a flop before having any official data.

I hate the word unicorn. It’s using fantasy to describe something very much reality. But I don’t want to digress from the larger point I’m making to go down the unicorn rat hole. Just please don’t use that word around me. I will likely throw up and that won’t be pleasant.

We’re on the same page today Fred. Likely because during AOL TechCrunch Disrupt the word unicorn is being thrown around like crazy.

The conversation around tech startups has been that “90% of companies started fail”. Hence, 10% may have some success and perhaps 1% or 2% will be incredibly successful. That is why the tech press and others call them unicorns — they are incredibly rare.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. More businesses can succeed if we:

Change our mindset for what success is

Create a culture of helping small businesses succeed

Don’t make the bar for failure so low

Let’s take these one a time.

What is success to you? For a business to be successful depends very much on what it set out to do from the beginning. Some businesses are built purely for fun … so the metric for success here is; are you having fun? Some businesses are started with dreams of changing how the world works in some way like mass communication networks or solving issues like access to clean water. So the measure of success for these companies should be; are people all over the world communicating using your product and do more people have access to clean drinking water than before you started, respectively.

Success in startup land is typically about, as Fred Wilson pointed out in his post this morning, valuation. Why did Slack take tens of millions of dollars that its founder explicitly said it didn’t need? Because in the current environment you take money when you can and get the best valuation possible. Stewart Butterfield is simply playing the hand he has been dealt.

How we do change the culture to help more companies succeed? If we change the mindset from; how many unicorns will we start/find/invest in to, how many businesses can we start and keep in business for as long as possible — everything changes. Incredibly successful rocket-ship-like growth companies will still exist and will still earn their investors a lot of money and will still be rare… but everyone below that tier may have a better chance at success.

What is failure? And how can we make it harder for businesses to fail? Some ideas die because they are bad ideas. And that is OK. Sometimes you don’t know a bad idea until you try it. However, so many really great ideas die because the business dies. And a lot of times the business dies because it was ran poorly or didn’t reach its target market. Believe me, I know.

Remember my post Applaud when people make things? This is how you, whether you’re an investor or “just a consumer” can help businesses thrive. The next time you see a good idea try to support it. With your money, with a tweet, a blog post, tell your friends, anything. Every little bit helps that business stay alive. And, if you’re an investor or board member of a company that has a great product or idea, try to support them with more than just your money. Push customers and partners and talent to them. If you see them heading for a brick wall speak up!

Let’s help more companies succeed and stop using the word unicorn. I suggest; Rapid Growth Business.

I plan to go back to iOS when the next iPhone ships, and then back to Android six months after that. In this way, I can stay current on both operating systems and ecosystems which I think is useful in my business.

I wish I could do this again. For a time I was when we had a number of testing devices laying around. I’d pick one up and using it for a weekend here and there. During that time my eyes were opened to what was available on all platforms.

At that time Windows Phone stuck out to me as the winner over Android but iOS was still in the lead. I wrote:

Windows Phone is a much better competitor to iOS than Android currently is. It is clean, simple to use, vastly different than iOS (which is good since Android and iOS just bite off each other with each release), and really fun to play with. The problem? Official apps.

And official apps are still a problem on Windows. Windows Phone was great the way Mac OS was great for years. Microsoft just didn’t stick with it. They got beat. And now it seems like they are moving on.

It was expensive to have multiple new and up-to-date devices in service at the same time. I think our monthly bill was roughly $700 or so. Not cheap for a small business. I like Wilson’s approach a bit more. Switch between devices completely once a year or so. Perhaps I’ll find a way to do that too.

Writing has never been an issue for me. I’ve typed a bunch of posts here. But I’ve strayed from the personal stuff and have been all over the place. Also 90% of my posts are links to other things. So, for the next 30 days I’ll attempt to jot something down here. Something personal or a thought or … well … anything. No idea what it will be. But I’ll try. It might be fun. Want to try too?

(If you don’t have your own blog you can always consider using the same platform I do, which I helped build, called Barley CMS. Which helps pay for my coffee, food, and house. Or, you can try Tumblr, WordPress.com, or Squarespace. Which do not give me any money at all but whatever.)

Fred Wilson, in A Founder’s Notebook, describing how “hard” it is to subscribe to a blog that isn’t on Tumblr but is on the open internet.

My only complaint is that its not on Tumblr, where it would be an instant and easy follow. It takes more work to follow a blog when its on the open Internet (when you don’t use RSS. i don’t).

Sigh. He’s right, of course, but … sigh.

In the heyday of Google Reader it was the exact same amount of work to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed as it is to follow a Tumblog on Tumblr. Just one click. But now, with the RSS market so fragmented and waning it has, indeed, become more work to subscribe to blogs on the open Internet than it is to follow on Tumblr or Twitter.

There are initiatives in motion to help with this, but, like so many other great things on the web (see: microformats), they may simply never catch on at scale.

For those interested in how I subscribe to blogs both on the open Internet and elsewhere; I’m currently using Vienna on Mac as my feed reader. I do not read feeds on my iPad (though I used to) or my iPhone. I only read on Mac and filter things into Unmark to read/watch/buy/listen later. For me to subscribe to a blog is pretty painless; copy the URL of the blog, open Vienna, click Subscribe. (I don’t even need to paste.) So it is three steps rather than the one step that Fred needs to take on Tumblr.

I’ll take that hit for blogs I love to be on the open internet any day.